Two-Way Linear Probing Revisited

Abstract

Linear probing continues to be one of the best practical hashing algorithms due to its good average performance, efficiency, and simplicity of implementation. However, the worst-case performance of linear probing seems to degrade with high load factors due to a primary-clustering tendency of one collision to cause more nearby collisions. It is known that the maximum cluster size produced by linear probing, and hence the length of the longest probe sequence needed to insert or search for a key in a hash table of size n, is Ω(logn), in probability. In this article, we introduce linear probing hashing schemes that employ two linear probe sequences to find empty cells for the keys. Our results show that two-way linear probing is a promising alternative to linear probing for hash tables. We show that two-way linear probing has an asymptotically almost surely O(loglogn) maximum cluster size when the load factor is constant. Matching lower bounds on the maximum cluster size produced by any two-way linear probing algorithm are obtained as well. Our analysis is based on a novel approach that uses the multiple-choice paradigm and witness trees.